You've heard Hillary Clinton say "We have won the popular vote". That will be her campaign's arguement for why she deserves the nomination in Denver this August.
But there is a lot Clinton is not telling you with that statement.
In one sense, yes, Clinton has the popular vote. If you add up all the votes in the primary states - including Florida and Michigan - and all the caucus states that release their popular vote numbers, Hillary has a slight lead - about 164 thousand votes.
But there are three problems here: 1. Barack Obama was not on the Michigan ballot because according to the DNC rules, any state that moved it's primary ahead of Super Tuesday would be striped of it's delegates - rendering it's vote meaningless. So, Hillary technically won Michigan - but Obama wasn't on the ballot due to the rules. So counting Michigan in the popular vote is a bit of a stretch.
2. Both Florida and Michigan are not supposed to count. Like we stated above - these two states moved their primaries ahead of Super Tuesday, and therefore - according to the rules- neither votes should count. In fact all the candidates pledged not to campaign in Florida, and all but Hillary took their name off the Michigan ballot.
3. The Clinton ocunt of hte Popular Vote does not include the popular vote for caucus states that don't release official popular vote totals. For instance, Obama had more voters in Iowa - but all Iowa counts is the number of delegates the candidate gets at the end of the day (which is essentially a percentage of the number of votes that candidate got).
So, if you include Michiagn and Florida, and NOT include states like Iowa and Washington (another caucus state) - Clinton has the 164,000 vote lead.
However, if you take away Michigan, and include the Caucus state estimates, Obama leads by 274,000 votes.
If you simply give Obama the 'Unidecided' vote from the Michigan election - according to Clinton's Math - Obama still wins by 174,000 votes.
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